Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Louis L'Amour bloopers?

In one recently re-read book they bed down 3500 Texas longhorns on 6 acres of land, and later on 8. My house sits on a 1.5 acre lot. A mile down the road I have an undeveloped 6 acre lot. Seems like a mighty tight fit, for that many. What say you cattlemen?

Here is my math (if not in error) - but I know jack all about large cattle herds and cattle drives. Yeah, I know, LL researched the heck out of everything, and did a few cattle drives with Charlie Daniels, but still...


Say each animal needs a 3 X9 "footprint", or 27 square feet to bed, or standing. Not counting the horns. Laying cows side by side and end to end like dominos means 94,500 sq feet, no spaces between. That's a bit over 2 acres (87,000+ sq ft) . So 6 acres would give each animal less than 3 body spaces, or about 3 if body space is over-estimated.

Do-able on paper, but is it in actual practice feasible to bed 3500 free-range, half (at least!)-wild longhorns that closely (6 acres - I'm more comfy with 8) in the open, with only a half dozen or so drive riders, and only two at night?

In another book, his people come into the Tongue River Valley somewhere up around the Pumpkin Creek area IIRC and "follow it up" (the Tongue) to the Yellowstone at Miles City. True, that's "up" north, map-wise, but down river - the Tongue flows north to it's confluence with the Yellowstone less than a mile from my FIL's house. This one could have been a LL brain fart, looking at a map, or just overlooking known knowledge, or a slip of the Tongue.

Pun intended...... . Only things I've ever questioned in his books - and I think I've read all, or nearly all, most of those multiple times.

Or it could be I mis- interpreted somewhat ambiguous verbage....

I have covered most of the ground he talks about in Mojave crossing. Have even been in the cabin he supposedly wrote it and a few others in near tabletop mountain. He got the names of places right but some of the route made no sense.

No offense, but if any of y'all have ever written anything more complicated than a post on the 'fire...well, it's difficult to get it all right. L'Amour was an entertaining writer, but not the best, by any means and if you look hard enough, you'll probably find more mistakes than that in the average 200-300 page novel he put out. Mojave Crossing and Lonely on the Mountain are two decent reads.

Elmer Kelton is another highly-touted "authentic" western writer. He tends to put 30-30's in his characters' hands twenty years before the cartridge was developed and also to celebrate mediocrity.

They aren’t too accurate are they?

With Mr. L'Amour, I knew he was a good writer, and knew he did his homework.

When I came across one of his flubs I just chuckled to myself. None of us are perfect, and when he stumbled, it just added that much more to his mystique.


Reading some other writers, I don't find it quite so amusing. Their ignorance puts me off... And I don't tend to read them again.

The bar has been raised to astounding heights with the internet. You think your uncle who had all L'Amour's stuff in 1972 knew that the 30-30 wasn't around in 1872? Or cared? When I was a kid, you'd have to be a voracious reader and student of western history to know these things. The internet changed all that since information/history, some of it even right, was now available at everybody's fingertips without buying the whole Time-Life western history set. People expect more accuracy now and it is more easily doable in the case of movies, with the proliferation of accurate replicas.

Partially off-topic but, with movies, I don't expect the 1956 movie The Searchers to be completely accurate. There are lots of things about it that are, compared to other movies of the era, but for instance, SAA's and '92 Winchesters weren't available in 1869. Alan LeMay wrote it and it has been so long since I read it that I remember little about his descriptions of weapons in it. In another novel of his The Unforgiven, I would rate his descriptions of weapons of the time period, very highly. The movie is slightly less so but is not bad for 1960.

Edited to clarify...the above isn't directed towards RockinB or anybody else in particular.

The Western novel, as well as the Western movie, were written to be entertaining for whoever was reading or watching. Accuracy, either geographically or historically, is often nowhere close to being right. As much as I love John Wayne movies and consider The Searchers to be the best western movie ever made, the time frame and their choice of guns is not right.

I'm not a L'Amour fan, but I have read every western novel Zane Grey wrote, and have the hard backed copies of those books. I have found Grey's books to be pretty much accurate as far as the time frame goes for things. But, as with any other writer, he wrote his books to sell, and as such the storyline was what was most important.

He wrote fiction, not history. Fictional people in fictional places doing fictional things. Just enjoy them for that they are.

I never was a fan of either L’Amour or Grey.

Not that they were bad writers or anything, just fiction was really never my gig.

What Rock Chuck said.

If I refused to read or watch anything less than 100% factual I'd be out of business. Entertainment is what it is.

I've noticed the further west you go the more story telling is revered. In the east we call it lying.

Absaroka County wasn't real either but the people living there got a lot of top reviews here.

One of the reasons many of the memoirs of the famous mountain men are generally taken with a grain of salt, is they were ghost written 40-50-60 years after the fact by eastern writers. 😉

This! Just like the old dime novels from back in the day. These novels always bothered Kit Carson. Especially after his experience with the White massacre. Read about it. It upset him terribly.

My take is both books and movies portrayed what readers and movie goers expected at the time they were written/released, not necessarily what was factually accurate for the time period portrayed.

One of the most famous Indian speeches was the surrender speech of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, ending with 'from where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever'. It's repeated over and over in history books. But there's evidence that he didn't say it. When he surrendered, a young army officer, Lt Woods, claimed to have written it down verbatim. Woods also wrote for Harpers Magazine and wasn't know for his honesty. There's no accurate record of whether Joseph or Woods said it and some historians believe that it's fake.

Same with the interviews with Ol’ Jim Beckwourth. Apparently he never allowed the truth to ruin any of his stories. Sometimes he was even two, or even three places at once!

Was it J. Frank Dobie, in one of his books that wrote about the time he was in a small ranching town in Arizona and a bunch of cowboys came riding down the street with their hoglegs a blazing. He stopped one and asked him what was going on and the cowboy answered him something like "well there’s this writer here from back east name of Grey that hired us to ride up and down the street a-shootin’ to add some color to the scenery!"

Apparently the town wasn’t western enough to Grey’s likin’!

Have read most of his novels. Made working the graveyard shift a little easier many times. Have one question.........Why has someone not made a movie of "Last Of The Breed " ? Would seem in this day with such overiding interest in everything Russian it would be a nobrainer. Who would get your vote to play Joe Mack ?